Guillotine (1791)

Guillotine proposes a machine for humane decapitation.

      In 1789, at the start of the French Revolution, Joseph-Ignace Guillotine (1738-1814), a medical doctor of progressive views, proposed a thorough-going reform of the French penal system. Inspired by the humane and rational principles of the Enlightenment, Guillotin's proposals included in single method of execution to replace the massy horrors of breaking on the wheel and hanging by the neck. Guillotin's mechanism would prevent suffering, while making  capital punishment more democratic; beheading was traditionally the punishment reserved for aristocrats-an efficient decapitation machine would spread that privilege to all classes.
      In 1791 the French National Assembly appointed a committee to push the project through. Although Guillotin was involved, the prime mover was Dr. Antoine Louis, Royal Physician and Secretary of the Academy of Surgery. The basic design adopted, with a blade hauled to the top of a high frame and then released, was not novel-such machines had been in use since Middle Ages. Its advance upon earlier models lay in the beveled-edge triangular blade.
      Originally dubbed the "louison" or "louisette", after Dr. Louis, the machine was soon being called the "guillotine". It became the symbol of revolutionary extremism, as the terror was unleashed upon alleged "enemies of the people". King Louis XVI was an early victim, executed on January 21, 1793. Despite its bloodthirsty revolutionary associations, the guillotine remained in use in France until, 1981.

"The mechanism falls like thunder; the head flies off, blood spurts, the man is no more".
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, 1789

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Electroscope

Image
Nollet's device detects and measures electric charge. Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700-1770) was the first professor of experimental physics at the university of Paris. At that time electrostatics was a topic of great interest. Nollet's electroscope was designed to detect and crudely measure electric charge. An insulated charge sensor protruded into a cylindrical container, the ends of which were closed by two flat glass windows. The bottom of the sensor (the part in the cylinder) was fitted with two leaves of metal foil ( usually gold). If the sensor's opposite, extruding end was brought into contact with a negatively charged body, electrons were repelled into the two leaves and they separated. The degree of separation was function of the size of he charge. A second negatively charged body contacting the extruding end would cause the leaves to separate more, whereas a positively charged body subsequently applied to the same end would cause the separation to decrease.
Read more

Semaphore

Image
Chappe pioneers a long-range, rapid, visual signaling system. In Paris in 1791, a little-known engineer and inventor named Claude Chappe (1763-1805) began to experiment with an optical signaling system or visual telegraph. His ambition was to send complex messages via a succession of towers using a combination of signaling arms. Three years later, in 1794, working with the aid of his four brothers, Chappe demonstrated his first optical semaphore. His string of fifteen towers placed within sight of each other was able to transmit a message 120 miles (190 km) from Paris to Lille in only nine minutes. The project's burdensome costs were borne by a French leadership who were recently at war with Austria and eager for any strategic advantage in communication.      Each tower was topped by a 30-foot (9 m) mast to which a rotating arm was attached with smaller, counterbalanced wooden arms at its ends. These could move through the horizontal and vertical and in a series of seven 45-d
Read more

Ambulance

Image
Larrey introduces the medical-car vehicle. Ambulance first began to appear on the Napoleonic battlefields of France in 1792. Their inventor, surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey (1766-1842), had grown frustrated with regulations requiring him to stay to the rear. After observing how the mobility of the French artillery helped it to quickly disengage from an advancing enemy, Larrey proposed to the military hierarchy what he called ambulance val-ante, or "flying ambulance", that would follow the artillery into battle and tend to the wounded where they fell.      Larrey devised a horse-drawn wheeled carriage with a central compartment able to transport two patients comfortably on leather-covered horsehair mattresses; windows on either side provided good ventilation. Inside, patients could be moved in and out easily on floors set on rollers. Recessed areas contained medicines and medical equipment, and ramps at the rear doubled as emergency operating tables. “Before… the fl
Read more